Perceptions of Polarisation on US Foreign Policy Matters

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Jisoo Kim, whose focus is on perceived polarisation in the United States. Such perceived polarisation refers to perceptions of other political groups’ positioning in comparison to one’s own, and may be moderated by political communication across political boundaries.

Patterns may further depend on the specific issues being discussed, and the focus of this paper is especially on foreign policy debates in the US, which may or may not be less politicised – at the moment, for instance, Democrats and Republicans are drifting apart in their attitudes about military aid to Ukraine.

The present study surveyed some 2,000 participants who identified with one or the other of the two major US parties, capturing their use of centrist as well as partisan media, their frequency of communication with various discussion partners about selected political issues, and their understanding of the two parties’ positions on these issues. The latter was also used to assess their perception of polarisation between the parties, and was compared with the average of Democrat and Republican participants’ own positioning on these issues to determine the overshoot in such perceptions.

Republicans and Democrats overestimated their opponents’ different positioning on the domestic issue of gun control, but not on Ukraine; here, counter-partisans did not necessarily overestimate the ideological stance of the other side. Talking with political opponents about such issues further increased perceptions of polarisation; attitude-aligned partisan media use was consistently associated with an overestimation of polarisation on these issues.